


Red, White And Blue

by Melody_Of_The_River



Category: Sharp Objects (TV), Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
Genre: C'mon this is a Sharp Objects fic so of course there is self harm, F/M, I don't even ship them in a sexual way, John and Camille just get each other you know, Platonic Relationship, Post-Canon, Self-Harm, but they've got shared misery and i'm ALL for that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 10:02:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17865206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melody_Of_The_River/pseuds/Melody_Of_The_River
Summary: Why couldn’t they have just let me finish? It would’ve looked so beautiful, in the end.Red and white and blue.





	Red, White And Blue

Should I wear that red lipstick Eileen gave me last month for my birthday? I should, yes, my face looks dead, lifeless, empty. But there are so many options to choose from. Red, white, blue? What, I wonder, should I paint my face today?

In the end I go with nothing – plain face, black clothes, my staple, my go-to choice. It’s comfortable, convenient, inconspicuous, and I really would like to be invisible today. That one patch of skin on my back that I finally managed to cut into is still healing; it protests whenever I pull on my shirt too roughly, or tug at the ends of my jacket. But it feels… _oh,_ it feels. Good. So _damned_ good – a fucking victory, really. Eileen and Frank would never understand, would they? They don’t understand the sheer triumph I felt at finally being able to reach back and run the knife across the still-untouched expanse of freckly skin, shred it, decorate it, tattoo it. Perfect, red circles. White knuckles where I clutched the porcelain of the washbasin too hard. Blue, blossoming bruises across all my pretty limbs from Adora’s love and care, still festering on my skin. Reminding. Teaching. Taunting.

 _Sometimes when you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them,_ Amma’s words ring in my head at thoughts like these. I really would like to forget now. It’s been long enough, no?

Why couldn’t they have just let me finish? It would’ve looked so beautiful, in the end.

Red and white and blue.

 

 

Eileen calls me for breakfast, and I heed her motherly demands. _Here, have some French toast_ , she says. _Have some soft-boiled eggs. Have some toast. Some honey? Peanut butter?_

She wouldn’t have had to be doing this had she just let me finish.

I told them what I had been thinking of, a few days ago. A way to spend all this time on my hands. Frank took longer than I thought to make a decision. But ultimately, he decided that it wouldn’t be too bad. The center is close-by, after all, I can go and be back home in under an hour. Eileen doesn’t want me to go, still feels a bit uneasy, but I’ve tried to convince her. _I’m fine_ , I have said, countless times now. _I’m fine_ , I tell her now, clutching a ghost’s music library, and digging crescent-moon scars into my palms.

I think I should cut my nails when I come back home.

“Be safe, now, alright,” she kisses my cheek, “Love you.”

“Love you too,” I smile back, hoping it looks genuine.

 

 

I don’t know how I thought of going for shooting practice or what train of thought led me to blurt it out at dinner three or four nights ago. I’ve never gone shooting before, how very not-Southern of me. But I’ve always had other things to pass the time with. And now with their absence, this seems like an almost natural choice. The kickback feels alright, not as fantastic as a sharp object in my skin, but good enough. It hurts my shoulder (and the still-healing cuts on my back) the first three, four, five times. But I keep going. My shots are wonky. I usually miss the target eight out of ten times. I waste bullets.

Good thing I’m not here to hunt.

 

 

The first day after shooting, I come back home, try to dodge Frank and Eileen by running up the stairs but they catch me before I do.

“Camille!” Frank’s voice travels from his study. I sigh, and start walking back downstairs again, my footsteps heavy, like a petulant teenager.

“Yes?” I ask him, when I reach the door of his study.

He holds up a paper envelope.

“John Keene, huh?” he says.

My eyes must have widened upon hearing the name, and Frank chuckles like I’m his teenage daughter caught exchanging love letters with the pretty boy in town.

“Here,” he hands it to me, and I reach forward and take it. It’s a simple enough conversation, he doesn’t bother me further, doesn’t ask how the first day of shooting went – we’ll probably talk about that at dinner – and doesn’t ask about the letter at all. I’m grateful he doesn’t; I wouldn’t know what to tell him anyway.

When I have safely locked my bedroom door behind me, I sink down tiredly onto the bed, and hastily remove the contents of the letter from its brown enveloped packaging.

His handwriting is simply horrendous – that’s the first thing I notice when I open it. Every alphabet seems to be written in a different style, and they fit together rather awkwardly, the T’s jutting out harshly a complete contrast to the sweet curves of the S’s. It’s not much, the letter, just asks how I’ve been doing. What I’ve been up to, whether I have gone back to work yet, that kind of stuff. It’s barely a paragraph long, and at the end he writes “Love, John,” so simply that I can’t help but smile at it, at the naivety of it. Or no, “naivety” isn’t right – John is anything _but_ naïve. But the letter sounds odd in his voice, looks odd too, in his wobbly uneven handwriting. But those two words don’t seem to.

They feel true. Maybe that’s why I smile.

I put the letter in my cabinet, and don’t think about it for the next two weeks.

 

 

When I am finally reminded of it, by Frank of course, I write down a hasty reply and post it the same day. Nothing deeper than _I’m doing fine, how are you?_ A good simple conversation.

Honest, no, but good enough.

He replies the very next day.

 

 

 

And the replies… keep coming.

We never talk about the things that happened. Wind Gap does not exist in the letters. I’m not Camille Preaker, daughter of one murderer, sister to another, self-harmer, depressed journalist living with her editor and his wife. A filthy free loader, a despicable creature.

No, in his letters I am none of those things.

He writes to me like I’m a friend of his in some foreign country, who he’s never met before. He asks me questions that I know (and I know that _he knows)_ he’s asked me already. He asks me about my “work” like it exists, though he knows I’m nowhere near in the right mind to work at the moment. He tells me about his last months at high school like a youthful, optimistic teen with nothing but time and opportunities laid out in front of him.

I revel in it, the attention.

Over time, his letters get more frequent, and I answer his enthusiasm with whatever I can match on my own. He asks me about my alma matter, asks me how I picked a major, asks me trivial things from two decades ago like I’m his mother, his elder sister, his guidance counsellor, and his best friend.

He wants to forget. I can see that in his letters. Everyone at Wind Gap keeps reminding him. They know him as “The Kid Whose Sister Died That One Summer” and though he’s been absolved of all suspicion in the crime, the words “Sister Fucker” still follow.

He wants to forget. He’s not doing this out of any kindness for me. I know that. To him, I represent someone equally tainted, but someone who escaped. His life’s fantasy. He loves it, I’m sure.

But I do too. It’s been so long since I’ve managed to forget. So long since something has managed to do it without piercing my skin.

I get better at shooting. The kickback hurts less. Far less than it used to. And on the day I finally hit my target – a bullet straight to the heart – I get another letter. A sweet, cheerful one, telling me he’s gotten accepted to Missouri State University. He’ll study the culinary arts, he says. It’s a good subject, detached from everything they’ve seen. An escapist fantasy that I can’t help but be swept up by.

“Sure,” I write back on my next letter, “Just stay away from all those sharp objects.”


End file.
